Eric Swanson ‘82 Inducted into National Inventors Hall of Fame
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Eric Swanson, a 1982 alumnus of the UMass Amherst Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department and a research affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is one of 17 innovation pioneers being honored in the 2025 class of National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF) Inductees.
Swanson collaborated with James G. Fujimoto of MIT and David Huang of the Casey Eye Institute at the Oregon Health & Science University to invent optical coherence tomography (OCT). OCT is a pioneering technology that makes detailed and unprecedented images of body tissues, especially the retinal tissue in the back of the eye, without any pain or discomfort.
According to the NIHF, OCT has had a transformative influence on ophthalmology by improving the detection, diagnosis, and management of many sight-impairing eye diseases, including macular degeneration, glaucoma, and diabetic retinopathy. OCT is also used in cardiology and across a growing range of applications in the medical field and beyond.
In partnership with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the NIHF will honor Swanson, Fujimoto, Huang, and the other 2025 NIHF inductees on May 8 at one of the innovation industry’s most highly anticipated events — “The Greatest Celebration of American Innovation®.”
More about Eric Swanson
Eric Swanson was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1960. From an early age, Swanson was fascinated with electronics, and his mother consistently encouraged his curiosity and exploration. “I would take apart various electronics devices, like my mom's clock radio, and try to understand how they worked and rebuild them into something new,” he told the NIHF.
This interest eventually led Swanson to study the fields of electrical engineering and computer science. After earning his BS in 1982 from the UMass Amherst, he obtained his master’s degree from MIT in 1984. At MIT he also began working with Fujimoto and Huang.
For his contributions to OCT, Swanson has received numerous honors, including co-recipient of the 2012 António Champalimaud Vision Award; the 2017 Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize from the National Academy of Engineering; the 2023 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award; and a 2023 National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
Swanson was elected a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2017 for contributions to OCT and leadership in optical networking. In 2002 he was elected a fellow of the Optical Society of America (now Optica) for pioneering contributions to the fields of intersatellite-laser-communication systems, fiber-optic-communication networks, and biomedical-optical imaging.
More Things You Need to Know About Eric Swanson (from NIHF) >>>
The path to inventing OCT
According to his NIHF bio, Eric recalled that, while serving as associate group leader at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, he “began collaborating with his future co-inventors: Fujimoto, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT; and Huang, then an M.D.-Ph.D. student at Harvard Medical School and MIT who was pursuing his thesis in Fujimoto’s lab.”
Fujimoto had been working with “femtosecond lasers, which could generate extremely short pulses of light for studying high-speed atomic and electronic processes, and he wanted to explore the possibilities of using light to see structures inside the body.”
At the time, according to an article by the Lasker Foundation, Swanson was working on intersatellite laser communications and high-speed fiber-optic networks. “Fujimoto recognized that Swanson’s cutting-edge skills and these state-of-the-art technologies might benefit the applications that he and Huang were exploring. In particular, the systems that Swanson was developing harnessed interferometry strategies to track light from distant satellites with precise spatial resolution, which required reliable detection of weak incoming signals.”
Consequently, Fujimoto invited Swanson to join his biomedical-engineering venture. According to the Lasker article, “With Swanson’s resources and expertise, the researchers borrowed concepts and components from optical communications. Crucially, they moved to fiber optics, which helped the light waves to interfere efficiently and bestowed additional advantages. This innovation, married with many others, eventually increased speeds by orders of magnitude and made the equipment more compact and practical.”
Teaming up with a group of eye doctors to investigate biomedical engineering applications, Fujimoto, Huang, and Swanson built the first OCT machine in 1990. As the NIHF bio noted, “Beginning their experimentation with in vitro images of both retinal and coronary artery tissue, the collaborators successfully revealed structures beneath the surface in impressive detail. They published the results of their work in the journal Science in 1991 and earned a patent on OCT in 1994.”
Describing how OCT works, Swanson told the NIHF that “OCT is very analogous to radar or sonar or ultrasound in that you send out a pulse from a transmitter, listen for the various reflections, and measure how strong they are and when they arrive in time. But because OCT uses light instead of radio frequencies or sound, it has a much shorter wavelength, and because of that and other factors, you can get very precise, very-high-sensitivity measurements.”
As Swanson concluded about OCT, “It has had a tremendous positive societal impact because of the inherent features of this technology that have led to improved patient outcomes and research into various disease mechanisms and therapies.”